NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Why Amazon and Netflix Made a Big Play for Sports

They're not sports companies by any means. But the smartest companies learn fast where their customers are heading and meet them there, with the right products to sell them. 

Expert Opinion By Howard Tullman, General managing partner, G2T3V and Chicago High Tech Investors @howardtullman1

Aug 13, 2024

 

The smartest players who are now winning in major markets are those whose primary advantage is learning faster than their competition--learning faster about the state of their marketplaces and swiftly reacting in real time to the changes they uncover.

You can't be it if you can't see it. That's why learning to manage the often-overwhelming flow of new data now available and turning that flood into useful and actionable information is a critical skill set in the global digital economy. Two of the most crucial things that smart entrepreneurs are incorporating into their plans are: (a) how to better determine and define the shifting needs and desires of their target customers; and (b) knowing who, what and where they are actually competing against in order to attract, win and retain those customers. The idea is that there may be incremental and sometimes even larger openings readily available in spaces adjacent to your current verticals seems obvious, but it's often overlooked.  Companies often ignore the chance to "slide to the side".

 Surprisingly, in many cases, the losing laggards are those who don't quickly appreciate that the scope and scale of competition has expanded beyond their traditional competitors to include new players, new offerings, alternative consumer choices, and adjacent markets that are readily accessible -- merely a click away. They're also missing changes in demand that have almost nothing to do with their current products or services. Their typical reaction as their revenues and profits shrink is to double down and do more of the same rather than shift their approach and strategies to adapt to the new realities and take a much broader view of the landscape. Often, the main barrier to an effective response is the locked-in reluctance to change what they've always done and what has historically worked.

The changes we're seeing these days simply aren't the kind that you can wait out or wish away.  

As more and more foundational products become commoditized or tired, often through externalities like changing tastes or attitudes rather than any fault of the providers, the most exciting opportunities and accompanying profits move elsewhere in the value chain. It becomes necessary for viable competitors to identify those new locations and quickly develop brand extensions, responsive products, enhanced or expanded services, and new delivery channels to meet the customers' emerging needs and to deliver the goods when and where they're now at. You've got to be there when the buyer is ready to buy - the markets no longer wait for providers to catch up.

Of all things, kids' "clothing" offers a very interesting and telling example and a very challenging look forward for the major apparel manufacturers. Right now, tens of thousands of game-playing teenagers globally are spending more time and money in front of their screens styling, outfitting and branding their online gaming avatars than they are on their actual clothing. Swifties and sneaker heads are obvious exceptions to the rule, but suffice it to say that none of the major luxury or sports brands (including teams) can afford not to be an active presence in these growing virtual worlds.

This is not only because there are serious dollars to be made in the gaming space (where the New York Times makes more money than on advertising) by marketing and selling this digital stuff. But also because this is a powerful and compelling way to grab mindshare and establish brand identities in the heads of millions of future consumers who will eventually "graduate" into the real world.  

A more major and important shift is happening as billions of dollars are rapidly moving away from classic entertainment vehicles and network TV toward anything and everything that has to do with sports, gaming and gambling. There's no longer any urgency, novelty or FOMO associated with the latest mediocre sequel, newly-cast, oldie-but-goodie, or CG-stuffed action film filled with nobodies. For every crazy breakout like Deadpool & Wolverine, there are several dozen films that never even make it to a theatrical release because the studios and distributors decide not to waste the marketing dollars on films that no one wants to see.

Sports remain a real-time offering while consumers worldwide have become convinced (in part because the industry itself has sold them on the idea) that there's nothing on television or in the movie theatres that you won't be able to see on your own device in the very near future. NBC's amazing efforts to completely slice, dice and fractionalize the Olympics and make everything available all day, in every way, and over every channel was a clear glimpse of the future of the on-demand streaming world. But the Olympics only happen every couple of years. F1 racing has become a must-have for corporate sponsors chasing tech bros and European soccer continues to explode as well, but these will simply be additional content generators which will further replace and displace traditional entertainment fare.

Amazon spent more than $1 billion to stream Thursday night NFL games. It certainly wasn't lost on them that in a typical, three-hour NFL game, the actual playing time is around 11 minutes. While Amazon is one of the few tech companies also still spending big on new entertainment series because of the power of the Prime package, we're seeing other large players like Netflix also spending vast amounts to make multi-year commitments to carry NFL games.  Even fake sports are hot: Netflix also agreed to pay about $5 billion for the rights to WWE wrestling.

It's a fairly fundamental calculation - you've got to go where the fans, and the eyeballs, are spending their time. As Coach Walz would surely say: fish where the fish are.

           

 

 

David Brooks: Coddling

The Age of Coddling Is Over

Learning what hardship has to teach us.

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

·         April 16, 2020

Over the past decades, a tide of “safetyism” has crept over American society. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it in their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” this is the mentality that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The goal is to eliminate any stress or hardship a child might encounter, so he or she won’t be wounded by it.

So we’ve seen a wave of overprotective parenting. Parents have cut back on their children’s unsupervised outdoor play because their kids might do something unsafe. As Kate Julian reports in “The Anxious Child and the Crisis of Modern Parenting” in The Atlantic, parents are now more likely to accommodate their child’s fears: accompanying a 9-year-old to the toilet because he’s afraid to be alone, preparing different food for a child because she won’t eat what everyone else eats.

Meanwhile schools ban dodge ball and inflate grades. Since 2005 the average G.P.A. in affluent high schools has risen from about 2.75 to 3.0 so everybody can feel affirmed.

It’s been a disaster. This overprotective impulse doesn’t shelter people from fear; it makes them unprepared to deal with the fear that inevitably comes. Suicide rates are way up, depression rates have skyrocketed, especially for girls. As Julian notes, a staggering number of doctor visits now end with a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication, like Xanax or Valium.

But there has been one sector of American society that has been relatively immune from this culture of overprotection — medical training. It starts on the undergraduate level. While most academic departments slather students with A’s, science departments insist on mastery of the materials. According to one study, the average English class G.P.A. is above 3.3 and the average chemistry class G.P.A. is 2.78.

While most academic departments have become more forgiving, science departments remain rigorous (to a fault). As much as 60 percent of pre-meds never make it through their major.

Med school is intrinsically hard and is sometimes harder than it needs to be. But it trains people to work at a very high level amid incredible stress.

“There is tremendous value in knowing they can wake you up in the middle of the night and you can still make a good decision,” says Adina Luba Kalet, director of the Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Med schools also instill a demanding professional ethos, which stretches back thousands of years. “Doctors are taught to run into the fire and not away from it,” Kalet continues. “Today, the young doctors feel free to say, ‘I’m terrified, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ That’s courage. We’re staying. We’re a team.”

It certainly doesn’t always happen, but the professional ideal is clear, she concludes. “You can save lives. And when you can’t save lives you can be in the darkness with patients even if there is nothing to offer. You stay.”

Med schools are struggling to become more humane and less macho, more relationship-centered and less body-centered. But when you look at what’s happening across the country right now, you see the benefits of their tough training.

This week The Times Magazine ran a diary by an E.R. doctor named Helen Ouyang. To enter the E.R. with her in this crisis is to enter another world.

Normal procedures crumble under the crush of patients. A man dies unattended, sitting in a chair. A veteran physician feels stripped of his invincibility. The core of Ouyang’s diary is her acceptance that it’s impossible to do her work and still stay safe. “It seems impossible to avoid getting infected.”

Death and talk of death is everywhere. The virus seems to do whatever it wants. “We put our full minds and whole hearts into trying to save them. Then I see their bodies shut down anyway. They are alone.” Wearing the same masks for so long etches lines into her face, but she keeps going back in.

There’s absolutely no self-glorification here, just endurance. I’m reminded of Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s 1931 memoir. When hiring doctors for his hospital in the African jungle, he wrote, he never hired anyone who thought he was doing something grand and heroic. The only doctors who would last are those who thought what they were doing was as ordinary and necessary as doing the dishes: “There are no heroes of action — only heroes of renunciation and suffering.”

I’m also reminded of the maxim that excellence is not an action, it’s a habit. Tenacity is not a spontaneous flowering of good character. It’s doing what you were trained to do. It manifests not in those whose training spared them hardship but in those whose training embraced hardship and taught students to deal with it.

I’m hoping this moment launches a change in the way we raise and train all our young, at all ages. I’m hoping it exorcises the tide of “safetyism,” which has gone overboard.

The virus is another reminder that hardship is woven into the warp and woof existence. Training a young person is training her or him to master hardship, to endure suffering and, by building something new from the wreckage, redeem it.

David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The Road to Character” and, most recently, “The Second Mountain.” @nytdavidbrooks

NEW YORK TIMES APOLOGY

What Do Consumers Want? Pay Your Selfie

Allison Shragal, 28, of Chicago, isn’t a model, or Internet famous — she’s an administrative assistant for a general contracting company. But almost every day companies pay her to snap photos of herself engaging in routine activities — brushing her teeth, eating breakfast, cleaning the bathroom.

If Ms. Shragal takes enough selfies with her smartphone and uploads them to a special app, she has “an extra $20 to go get my nails done,” she said.

Her seemingly mundane images, when combined with thousands of others, contain insights that companies like Crest are eager to mine. They are using a Chicago-based company called Pay Your Selfie to gather those insights and present them in reports on consumer behavior that are meant to go where focus groups and surveys cannot.

Among the tidbits that Crest, owned by Procter & Gamble, learned from its recent month long quest for selfies: There’s a huge spike in brushing from 4 to 6 p.m., probably tied to a desire for happy-hour fresh breath. That knowledge could be useful when Crest decides which times of the day to start future social media campaigns.

Users of the app receive anywhere from 20 cents to $1 for each “task” completed — in Crest’s case, a snapshot taken “while brushing your teeth with your favorite Crest product.” Users can’t double-dip; the app allows only one selfie per task.

The selfies are a good way for companies to obtain information that people can’t or don’t articulate in focus groups or other traditional research methods, said Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. For example, they could lead to an understanding of which rituals go along with certain types of consumption, he said.

Pay Your Selfie, which has been in business since last September, doesn’t require participants to have followers on a site like Instagram. In fact, users don’t have to share their images publicly at all (although they can). That makes it different from a company like Popular Pays, which offers Instagrammers the chance to post about brands like Nike in exchange for giveaways or cash.

The option of privacy suggests a greater possibility for authenticity, said Aparna Labroo, a professor of marketing at the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management. “If the task comes up when a person is naturally engaging in a relevant activity and it’s minimally intrusive to take a selfie, they might actually capture some authentic moments.”

About 11 percent of the men in the Crest photos were shirtless, a level of comfort the brand rarely sees when it uses other tools in its research arsenal, said Kris Parlett, a senior communications manager for P.&G. Oral Care. Other research methods include recruiting volunteers to record videos of their oral care routine in their bathrooms or to brush their teeth in “insight suites,” mocked-up home bathrooms with mirrors that allow analysts to observe them.

“It’s not data you could get through Nielsen,” said Michelle Smyth, a founder of Pay Your Selfie, referring to the bare-chested photos. “It’s one-of-a-kind research.”

Companies set a target number of selfies to be collected, in the thousands or tens of thousands, and give Pay Your Selfie at least $2 per usable image, a portion of which goes to the selfie taker. A computer scans the photos to make sure that there’s a face and that the shot isn’t too dark.

App users, who must provide some basic biographical data like age and city, receive payment only for “validated” photos, and can cash out at $20. Eight Pay Your Selfie employees pore over the photos to produce reports on their findings.

The results are eye-opening, said Alex Blair, who owns four franchises of Freshii, a Toronto-based chain of healthy fast-food outlets. It has sponsored two tasks on Pay Your Selfie.

In one, the company asked participants to provide selfies with “healthy on-the-go” snacks. For some people that meant Snickers candy bars.

“We focus on organics and cool new macronutrients, and our consumers are into quinoa and kale and bean sprouts,” Mr. Blair said. “But some of these photos were so far from that wavelength, it’s really helping us kind of realign with the mass market.”

Mr. Blair said the selfies could be used to help determine whether stores should focus more on smoothies or prepackaged snacks. (The selfies leaned toward the latter.) The images also might identify neighborhoods to place new stores in, based on whether people are in their offices (suggesting a financial district opening might be a good bet) or on the couch at home in their exercise clothes.

One problem with traditional consumer research is the gap between what people say they do (or would like to think they do) and what they actually do. Selfies would seem to have the same problem, as anyone who’s ever posed for one and decided it was too embarrassing or revealing to share knows. 

But Ms. Shragal, for one, says she’s become so accustomed to the app that she doesn’t scrutinize the photos.

“In the beginning I focused on trying to do a cool picture,” said Ms. Shragal, who used to make aesthetic adjustments like wiping the toothpaste off her mouth before taking the Crest image. “But after doing it for so many months, I kind of just focus on doing the task correctly and getting it done.”

Often tasks don’t require owning or buying a company’s product. But Lakeshore Beverage, a Chicago distributor, asked users to snap a selfie with a Goose Island 312 ale, and learned which stores people visited to buy the beer.

“It was interesting to us because the user base on the app is a little more general than the beer-specific buyer that we target through our marketing,” said Matt Tanaka, who was until recently Lakeshore’s head of digital marketing. “It helps us when we’re talking to retailers where people took a lot of selfies to say these places are top of mind.” (In the case of 312, the places were Target and Walgreens.) Pay Your Selfie would not reveal how many clients it has worked with. 

The company also conducts its own research — partly as a way to attract new business. “What are you eating for breakfast?” was a recent task it asked its users to complete. For millennials, top choices were Pop-Tarts and Froot Loops, the photos showed. (Pay Your Selfie’s founders said they later had a meeting with a “major cereal brand.”) 

Even tasks not sponsored by individual companies “are a fast and powerful way to share what seems uninteresting information to consumers but critical information to marketers,” said Jean McLaren, president of Marc USA, an advertising agency whose clients include Rite Aid. She said she was considering working with Pay Your Selfie.

Ms. McLaren said she liked the idea of recreating a person’s pantry by stringing together multiple seemingly random selfies from the same users — a cheaper, faster way to get information that once could be obtained only through lengthy in-home interviews.

“It’s like automated voyeurism,” she said.

NY Times - A Complete Rip-Off of My INC. Blog Post from Tuesday and My Interview on Tasty Trade as well

READ MY POST: 

http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman-three-things-starbucks-does-better.html

read my post:

http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman-three-things-starbucks-does-better.html

How to Get a Job at Google Thomas Friedman

“The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it).”

SundayReview|OP-ED COLUMNIST

How to Get a Job at Google

FEB. 22, 2014

               Thomas L. Friedman

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — LAST June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.” He also noted that the “proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time” — now as high as 14 percent on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, “How’s my kid gonna get a job?” I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.

Don’t get him wrong, Bock begins, “Good grades certainly don’t hurt.” Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.

“There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. “If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”

The second, he added, “is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.”

What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”

And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it’s “intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn.” It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.

“They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. ... What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ ” You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.

The least important attribute they look for is “expertise.” Said Bock: “If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ‘I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.’ ” Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it’s not that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.

To sum up Bock’s approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one — besides brand-name colleges. Because “when you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.” Too many colleges, he added, “don’t deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don’t learn the most useful things for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.”

Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like G.P.A. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.

VIRTUAL U - NY Times Schools for Tomorrow Conference - Sal Khan Presentation

VIDEO 1

VIDEO 2

VIDEO 3

DAVID LEONHARDT  NY TIMES 

ANANT AGARWAL  President  edX

BIDDY MARTIN - President Amherst College

NANCY ZIMPHER - Chancellor SUNY